Barry Walsh

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Alexander Pope
“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
Alexander Pope

Richard Yates
“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

John  Williams
“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
John Williams, Stoner

Neil Postman
“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

John Kennedy Toole
“Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.”
John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

year in books
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560 books | 5 friends

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233 books | 12 friends

John Hayes
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